In recent years, customer behaviour has changed. People have spent their time on the Internet, so many brands use social media such as Facebook and Twitter as communication channels to approach consumers. Communication on social media have to make content interesting in order to attract customers who may help brands to share their content. Hence, many brands have started to use emojis for conveying messages to their own customers and it’s becoming the latest communication trend.
Fig 1: Emojis (Chaey, 2013)
What are emojis?
The Guardian (2015) have described that “Emojis are images you can incorporate into text, email, twitter, Facebook and chat applications to convey a message or an emotion. It is a shorthand way to communicate.”
Why do brands use emojis?
Many brands want to reach Millennials Generation who were borned on 1977-1997. They are essential targets that brands would like them to be their customers. This generation can be a brand representative because they always share interesting contents which they have seen. Using emojis in message may help brands communicate with customers easily because it can provide hilarious messages that can engage with their customers. Moreover, it may enhance brands’ content outstanding as well.
Which brands use emojis?
Since the beginning of this year, there are many brands that have used emojis for communicating with customers. I’ll raise two examples of brands that use emojis as below;
Coca-Cola: They have created #ShareaCoke Campaign for motivating people to share their breeziness. On Twitter, when customers tweeted #ShareaCoke, it will show clinking of two Coca-Cola bottles.
Fig 2: Share a Coke (Coca-Cola,n.d.)
Taco Bell: This brand has created #TacoEmojiEngine. When customers have tweeted taco emoji and any emoji and mention @Tacobell, they’ll send back a combination of these two emoji which can be seen in figure 4.
Fig 3: Taco Bell (TacoBell, 2015)
Fig 4: TacoEmoji (TacoBell, 2015)
Although, emojis may be fashionable, it can be one of the communication methods which can be engaged with customers. This maybe because it is a simple language which customers can easily understand and enjoy it. However, using emojis are not only inventive but also comprehensive in order to get customers completely understand completely messages that is sent by brands.
Reference List:
Brenner, M. (2015) The rise of the emoji for brand marketing. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/jan/26/rise-emoji-brand-marketing [Accessed 13 November 2015].
Chaey, C. (2013) Are Emoji Racist? Available from: http://www.fastcompany.com/3016256/fast-feed/are-emojis-racist [Accessed 14 November 2015].
Coca-Cola (n.d.) Share a Coke. Available from: https://twitter.com/cocacola/status/644930252821520384 [Accessed 14 November 2015].
TacoBell (2015) The Taco Emoji Happened. Available from: https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacoemoji [Accessed 15 November 2015].
KANOKNUP 
I am agree that emoji can touch to customers because of emotion on each icon. But, I am not quite sure that this will be an effective way. As I am a consumer, I may not much care with this icon. How about you? If you are a consumer, will you pay attention on these emoji?
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As a consumer, I think emojis is quite interesting, I like their idea that would like to engage with poeple daily’s live. However, I think it can reach a few customers that may lead to a failed strategy.
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I really like the idea of the taco and emojis, it’s awesome. The emojis might be a small part of the marketing but every little bit helps!
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For me, I have never known about Emojis in marketing before. I don’t use twitter so I don’t know that advertisers can create emoji to reflex hashtag like this. I just used them in text message app and some on Facebook post to talk with my friends because I think it shows some of my emotion better than a word. Maybe emoji is a great way to be used in Twitter because the platform of twitter is suitable for short texts, so users mainly post only a short text on their tweets. I think emoji makes their post look more interesting. But I don’t know that others think like this or not?
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I’ve idea similar to yours, message may look more interesting with emojis. It is suitable to be used on Twitter, so it can reach to a few customers. However, it maybe not a problem because those customers are their targets.
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Yes, it is true that using emoji is very common for online communication recently. I think these emojis are more likely to help people express their emotion, however when brands use emoji of their products is quite different. It may catches customer’s attention, but not so much.
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Actually, I agree with you that it cannot attract customers as much but many brands use it for communicating with their customers. This maybe because of the fact that brands would like to engage with their customers.
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